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The Sunday Salon: Dealing with Hidden Mess

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Happy Easter, to all who celebrate it! I hope you have plenty of Easter egg fun and a wonderful time with family today.

After a whole week of 60-70 F degree weather, I woke up many times last night, freezing. It seems we are back in the 25-32 F territory but luckily the day is expected to warm up slowly. Phew. All my winter jackets are at the dry cleaners so I sure hope I won't end up missing them.

I spent a good chunk of Saturday decluttering three rooms. I'm still not done but I am close. We generally do decluttering/organization every few months so I was surprised by the amount of stuff I piled into the recycle and the trash bag. Of course, most of them were from the "hidden storage" areas - which is where we I stuff items we I don't yet want to deal with (the husband would rather throw them and that upsets the occasional hoarder in me). Don't we all have one or two drawers/shelves/cabinets like that?

My office desk is perpetually cluttered so it feels amazing to have it clear and spacious - it's really a huge desk but much of the space ends up getting used by paperwork, bills, receipts, and magazines. I still have a good chunk of items lying on the office floor and a lot of paperwork in the bookshelves that need to be culled, so once that is done, I can move on to the coffee table which has its own pile of junk stored away for posterity. I guess I'm going to be doing this all week.

The husband is away in India for a couple of weeks to be at his brother's wedding. I'm super disappointed not to be there as well, especially since this is a family wedding and I had been planning on being there ever since the two got engaged. But I didn't want to deal with the almost 30 hour travel, of which 20 hours involve sitting in a narrow claustrophobic seat on a plane with very little room for movement or patience. My back and ribs haven't been very forgiving lately so it never helps me to challenge them.

I've been doing somewhat more reading than I did during the last two weeks. I finished French Milk and am now halfway through The House at the End of Hope Street. Aside from some shopping and cooking that needs to get done, I'll probably spend most of today doing more decluttering so I don't have much of it to do during the week.

It sure feels amazingly good. Oh boy. I love tossing stuff away, which makes me wonder why I even collect them. I guess I just go through a phase of collecting stuff and then a phase of getting rid of them.

Hope you are having a lovely Sunday. I'm sorry you couldn't travel with your husband to be there for the family wedding. That's such a bummer but hopefully he'll bring you lots of pictures! Hope you have a great week ahead!

It's probably for the best that you aren't at the wedding... traveling while pregnant is tough! My mother called last night and told me the local news reports said it was colder on Easter than on Christmas Day - yikes! GladI'm still in FL! Hope you have a good week :-)

Aw man, I feel you about the plane ride. I could barely tolerate that plane ride while not being pregnant -- by the time I got back to the States, I was a shadow of my former self, and that's WITH having been bumped up to first-class on the flight between Chennai and Frankfurt.

I finally got around to cleaning my desk a few weeks ago and I'm amazed because I seem to have hit the organizational sweet spot with all my desk stuff somehow and everything is STILL uncluttered! I had to laugh about your coffee table. Ours was always like that so we finally gave it away (we have a small living room anyway, so with it gone the room looks more spacious). But that of course didn't help with the clutter, which just moved onto the sofa itself! We'd be sitting on the sofa surrounded by piles of books (it's always books, isn't it?). So a few weeks ago we got a cart from IKEA. It's supposed to be for the bathroom but it's now our book cart :)